2011-04-16

Standardised Rich Edit Controls in Browsers

I might have writ about this already, I can't really remember.

I wish that there was a standard Rich Edit control in HTML. Something that enabled at least the basics of bold, italics, font families (perhaps not sizes :D), and tab indentation. I don't want to make a wish list. Perhaps have a simple one and a more advanced one, which would also include images (with drag and drop or copy and paste, not just a stupid uploader) and more advanced items.

Blogger's current Rich Edit control under Compose is almost painful to me. I much prefer Gmail's. Even that one has its deficits. Part of my problem is that everyone implements their own, so there are always differences. Things feel different in not-great ways. I get uncertain about what I can do, or how to make things spaced properly. (Is the underlying HTML using <p> or <br> for line spacing?) They're not all compatible with desktop word processors. (Which of these features will be retained when I copy and paste between these two windows?) Lots of websites that could benefit from some light formatting suffer for being incapable of easily incorporating one of the off-the-shelf solutions, and instead just use a plain text form.

I love plain text forms, but I'd appreciate consistency and a full feature set across most web sites, rather than spotty support, with this or that being alright. Let W3C standardise a feature set and define the HTML, let browsers implement it, and let web developers just do something like <form type="richtext"> :)